Suspects in journalist’s abduction in Iraq arrested

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Marines have arrested four men suspected of kidnapping American journalist Jill Carroll and holding her captive for 82 days early this year, a U.S. military spokesman told reporters Wednesday.

The four suspects were detained in Anbar province at least a month ago, another officer said.

The military decided to release details about the arrest in advance of Carroll’s upcoming 11-part series in the Christian Science Monitor detailing her kidnapping and captivity, spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said during a news briefing in Baghdad.

The 28-year-old freelance reporter was taken in early January in the Iraqi capital and freed March 30. She has since returned to the United States.

Marines believe they identified several places where Carroll was held, including one location about nine miles west of Fallujah. A lieutenant with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, noticed that the house bore resemblance to a place he had read about in intelligence reports, Caldwell said.

Marines detained the owner of a house, who led them to another location, Caldwell said. At the second home, Marines found a man believed to be a member of the Mujahadeen Shura Council, an al-Qaida-affiliated group.

That suspect’s information led soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division to a third house, north of the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, where troops dismantled booby traps before freeing two Iraqi hostages. Americans also raided a fourth site, but Caldwell provided few details about it.

The names of the four men are being withheld until American and Iraqi authorities decide how to prosecute them, according to the U.S. military.

Working as a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, Carroll was abducted in a western Baghdad neighborhood on Jan. 7. Gunmen ambushed the journalist and killed her translator, 32-year-old Alan Enwiyah, as the pair left the office of a prominent Sunni Arab politician.

During her captivity, Carroll was forced to appear on videotapes pleading for her life.

Her kidnappers, a previously unknown group calling themselves the Revenge Brigade, demanded the release of all Iraqi female prisoners. The military did release some women from detention but said the move was unrelated to Carroll’s captivity.

Carroll’s 11-part series, which begins Sunday night on the newspaper’s Web site, will detail how she was moved more than a dozen times, lived in close contact with Sunni Arab mujahadeen and was forced to “interview” her chief captor for hours at a time, according to the Web site.